Hello everyone. I’m a confused and somewhat lost husband in a 15 year marriage. I realize no two situations are alike, but I’d like to think many of us have commonalities to which advice or wide words can be provided.
It was a bit of a whirlwind courtship. I was very naive and had only had sexual relationships with the two women I had dated. My wife come to find out was the total opposite. It became evident at the end of our first date as she was insistent on having sex while I was resistant due to associating sex with a committed relationship. She hooked me by offering anal sex. Having never done that before I gave in and we were off to the races.
In the following months things got serious at a quick pace and we discussed moving in together. During this discussion she purged everything and more to me in a sort of confessional. She admitted to carrying on casual sexual relationships with multiple guys while we dated, including two guys who lived in her townhome complex. That was all surprising for a naive guy like myself. Even more shocking was her admission of working in the adult industry behind the scenes when she attended university in south Florida.
Admittedly I felt a flood of emotions, one of them being the excitement a prude like myself would feel after hearing that last part. We went all in together although my condition was moving in with me as I did not want to live in her complex given her past with those couple guys. It was hot and heavy from the start. One of our kinks was watching porn together, specifically from the two companies she worked for. Inevitably I suppose I told her I wanted to watch her with another guy prior to us getting engaged and married as we had done quite a bit of role playing up to that point. Some phone calls, a bit of a drive, and a weekend later and we both found our groove. We made almost weekly trips for a long while up until we got engaged.
We ended up going completely cold turkey on that aspect of our life for close to a year prior to our marriage even though we still role played. We had subtle discussions on occasion about doing it again and left it an open possibility. The weekend before our wedding I took a chance and set us up with a weekend away which included me reaching out to a couple of the guys I’d watched her with. I went full go to include buying a throw down wedding dress and new bride lingerie for her to wear. It was the height of my sexual pleasure to that point.
Fast forward up until a couple years ago and we hadn’t participated in any extracurricular sexual activity. One day my wife approached me and spoke of an opportunity to do some modeling for a friend of hers adult themed clothing and lingerie line. Pretty suddenly we found ourselves living pretty wild and exciting. The role playing was kicked back into full gear but abstained from including anyone else. The role playing became so intensive that I found myself not able to get hard the few times we ventured outside of the theme.
In the lead up to our 15th anniversary in October I’d decided I was wanting to give it another shot and set up another get away for us. I reached out to the same guy from prior to us getting married as we all remained in contact through the years. It was a wonderful weekend and my wife was beyond surprised.
Now the problem. I noticed subtle changes in my wife the last couple of months. A look at her credit card statements showed a charge every other week or so for a hotel. I couldn’t figure out where it was from the charge so I ended up putting an air tag in her car. I loosely followed her one day and ended up by finding her car in a hotel parking lot about an hour from our home. A couple hours later she left in her car and I see both the same guy who I watched have sex with her and another guy I didn’t recognize. Over the next couple weeks I followed her 4 times to other hotels.
I ended up confronting her last week. To her credit she owned everything. On the flip side she mentioned that she’s been very hurt by the fact I cannot get hard unless we role play. She acknowledged her responsibility in that but repeatedly mentioned how awful a feeling that is for a woman. Things have been ok with us since but there’s disappointment on both sides. Since then she’s gotten very needy in terms of attention and wanting affection from me. We’ve tried having sex a couple times and I just couldn’t get hard. Both times we resorted to role playing in order to have sex.
We start couples therapy this week and I’m very nervous about it. This has been a cleansing experience of release but I’m curious too if any of this is has happened to other couples. At this point I’m just wondering if we can ever get back to a regular sex life.
